Objective Value
This is the establishment of objective value, which coincides with the elimination of nihilism, subjectivism, agnosticism, and anything else that would seek to keep this case permanently hanging open in a limbo. Efilism has proven and can logically demonstrate the case for objective value (both objectively positive and objectively negative). First Clarification and The End of Incoherence # EFILism Objective Value = A Materialist Logically-Defined Substrate-Anchored Objectively-Identicial Explicanda & Explicans, which can & has reached ethical conclusions of certainty # Moral Subjectivism = An Anti-realist Logically-Incoherent Reality-Detached Analysanda, which neither outlines an explanation, unfolds an explanation, nor concludes an explanation; moral subjectivism is essentially a non-philosophy. Subjectivism just gives up the case. It's not a philosophy, it's an analysand. The declaration that falsely claims this case is either unsolved or unsolvable, is from here on being put to rest and ended: Objective Value - Simple While it is possible to have false purpose, false belief, false understanding, false information, false ideas, false concepts, and so on: there is no such thing as false sensation. There can only be positive states of conscious sensation (positive value), and negative states of conscious sensation (negative value). Everything outside and in between those values can only be either: # The absence of those 2 values # The mixture of those 2 values There is also a complete divide between: 1. Those phenomenological types of consciousness mentioned, that derive or posit information, which are packaged as "purpose, belief, understanding, ideas, concepts, phenomenology" which can all be confirmed "true or false" and "actually external, or simulated internal". 2. The raw sensation of feelings, which are physically forced generations of chemical reaction. They are not a payload or claim about "truths and falsehoods" and cannot be refuted, denied, or treated as if they are. That's even if for instance, you felt pain by an object that didn't actually hit you. While true the object didn't hit you, it does not follow that you didn't feel the pain. Note how sensation actually transcends all "understanding" and "misunderstanding". Note you cannot go back and revise sensation, change it, or correct it, based on updates of information, like you can with all types of consciousness in section 1. Note that placebo and psychosomatic effects exist, which allows sensation to arise independent of all other outliers in reality. Because it is the event and process of "sensation and qualia" in it of itself that is the real, undeniable, concrete value, that is definitively instantiated in the universe. The cogs in section 1. are only informational, derivative, suggestive, phenomenological outliers. Sensation cannot be put into the same pile of those cogs, doing so is not only a categorical error, but sensation also overrides them (it can't be refuted by them). Because succinctly: For as long as sensation is happening, it remains irrefutable. Once the sensation stops happening, then it is simply no longer the case that the sensation is happening. Note there is no room in that for "refuting" the sensation and qualia, it's like saying you can argue the sun out of existence. Objective Value - Advanced DNA life is the incident of deterministic chaos, has no reason to continue existing, serves no need or purpose while doing so. But DNA life is not just any code strung together by careless happenstance of physics - it also the code that invented pain and torture. Since we don't want to commit ourselves to ambiguous babytalk, instead of "bads, pains, ouches", this can be signified as Nociception in biology or Negative Valencein affective neuroscience. This is "objectively negative value", not opinions of bad value. It does not rely on the subject to "subjectively opine it with property", because correctly: the property was determined for the subject, not by the subject. The values are not dice, and they are not wildcards -- they cannot be indeterminately or arbitrarily decided by the system they are instantiated in. This is because the values are galvanizing, real physical forces of truly distinct manifested property. And these values are commenced by the universe's material determinism (just like literally everything else) - they are not commenced by any subject's discretional whimsy. These values are not "outside" of reality, they cannot be discounted from reality's equation just because they happen in nerves and brains. It also doesn't matter if they are activated "by" or "as" or "in" non-identical substrata, catalysts, entities, or "subjective" systems -- IE. - One subject has positive valence instantiated by peanutbutter, resulting in relieving nourishment. - One subject has negative valence instantiated by peanutbuter, resulting in anguishing allergies. Because such difference in no way changes the fact that each objective value exists, and exists distinctively and statically (they keep their static values and their separate values) - it's just that they are not instantiated totally identically across subjects. And finally, the fact that the event(s) and value(s) occur in subjects (more accurately called entities) does not refute, invalidate, or change even a single part of what happened. This is the point where the non-concrete (incoherent) idea of "subjective value" has been chopped up and examined as objective configuration in objective terms. Antinatalism and EFILism is based on preventing and eliminating objectively negative value from even having potential to exist. Identical, Distinct, and Static Value - Ethical Conclusion of Life Life is an objectively negative function. We have reduced the non-concrete, subjectively incoherent tug-o-war of bads and goods. We found and concluded this one, fundamental, unchanging, identical objective truth: "Sentient life starts with the need to fix needs, or be seriously harmed." That's the DNA bargain - an inherent negative and inherent jeopardy. No guarantees of satisfaction, safety, fairness, or purpose. At bedrock, it is nothing more than needing to fix your deprivations, or being seriously harmed. Further, you have no possibility of permanently fixing the deprivations, or permanently protecting yourself from them. Your deprivation and harm is always guaranteed; your satisfaction and safety is never guaranteed. And that's the end statement... or one of them. It explicates the entire point, that it is malignantly self-defeating for life to even exist, because life creates all of its own problems and drawback by existing (which includes needing any level of positive value in the first place).'' ''Conversely'': ''If life is prevented, every one of its possible problems and drawbacks are also prevented, including the problem of missing life's positives, and the problem of missing benefits! (You cannot miss a benefit if you are not created, you cannot miss a drawback if you are not created, and you cannot be harmed if you are not created; but that is only if ''you are not created, so it's still always crucial to ensure that life doesn't get created.) The following QEDs show the prevention of life is a double-action failsafe and solution, for all possible negatives and positives: QED #1 1. The loss of all positives cannot be a problem, but must be a solution, '''precisely because' it ensures there are no losers or problem-havers. 2. The prevention of all negatives cannot be a problem, but must be a solution, precisely because it ensures there are no victims or problem-havers. QED #2 - Prevention of a loss requires absence of a loser - Prevention of a victimization requires absence of a victim ''' - Prevention of a problem requires '''absence of a problem-haver - Prevention of a harm requires absence of a harmed - The consequent prevention of anything one could ever call a "gain or positive" therefore cannot be a problem, harm, loss, or victimization: yet prevention of life remains the successful prevention of all problem, harm, loss and victimization. And this applies regardless of any possible subjective view or opinion -- even if you viewed non-existence of life to be the maximum negative value, it's only life's existence that's making it possible for you to maintain that maximum negative value state: because life is the engine that's doing it. It's not non-existence of life creating the maximum negative value state. So turn the life-engine off, and it cannot maintain maximum negative value toward even the idea of the life-engine being turned off. Keep the engine off, and there can never be a problem or victim that results from the life-engine ever again. Keep the engine off, and it can never be problematic to lose any so-called positive generated by the life-engine. And it is only by ensuring the engine stays off that this is successfully accomplished. Behold the double-action failsafe and solution. (See point A. through D. if you even think of citing technological utopia or the idea of infinitely recurring life) Objective Value - Expert The answer for why you cannot deny the existence or the value of sensation and consciousness simply lies in the "transparency" of consciousness. Transparency is a technical term in the modern philosophy of mind. Consciousness is "transparent" if the system using it cannot, by introspection alone, recognize it as a representation. If consciousness were to become "opaque" (that is, if it were actually possible to "value" or "devalue" it as only a mechanical representation, like Hythloday71 and other nihilists suggest), then we would lose that exact property of consciousness. Think of it as opening a fridge door to check if the light is on or off, the truth of the answer depends on whether the door is open or shut. So you can probably see the problem: To deny the value of consciousness while being a transparent model of consciousness---and while other transparent models keep existing in the universe---you are using an Analysandum of Opacity '''argument that reduces consciousness to deniable values, which completely misses the Explicandum and Explicans of '''Transparency that renders that very Analysandum of Opaque value-deniability impossible. Until you establish an Explicandum and Explicans of Opacity in consciousness, like DNA did with Transparency, your Analysanda is essentially nothing more than a failed thought experiment that cannot coincide with reality. Inmendham and Efilism acknowledge this, so we do not attempt to refute consciousness as a mechanically opaque, valueless or deniable representation, this philosophy acknowledges consciousness is a mechanically transparent representation, that necessarily maintains undeniable properties of value in order to even objectively exist and function. This demonstration concludes why unconstrained theorizing and unconstrained logic (which is technically called Analysanda) is insufficient to discount the Explicandum and Explicans of objective reality. And Analysanda is always insufficient to discount objective reality. And it is this crucial distinction that makes-possible the refutation of all forms of misfired reductionism, nihilism, agnosticism, subjectivism, skepticism, dualism, nominalism, idealism, and all other logically-primitive models of truth that commit this error. Recall that a representation is transparent if the system using it cannot recognize it as a representation. A world-model active in the brain is transparent if the brain has no chance of discovering that it is a model. A model of the current moment is transparent if the brain has no chance of discovering that it is simply the result of information-processing currently going on in itself. We have arrived at a minimalist concept of consciousness. We have an answer to the question of how the brain moves from an internal world-model and an internal Now-model to the full-blown appearance of a world. The answer is this: If the system in which these models are constructed is constitutionally unable to recognize both the world-model and the current psychological moment, the experience of the present, as a model, as only an internal construction, then the system will of necessity generate a reality tunnel. It will have the experience of being in immediate contact with a single, unified world in a single Now. For any such system, a world appears. If we can solve the One-World Problem, the Now Problem, and the Reality Problem, we can also find the global neural correlate of consciousness in the human brain. There is a specific NCC (neural correlate of consciousness) for forms of conscious content (IE. one for the redness of the rose, another for the rose as a whole, and so on) as well as a global NCC, which is a much larger set of neural properties underlying consciousness as a whole, or all currently active forms of conscious content, underpinning your experiential model of the world in its totality at a given moment. Solving the One-World Problem, the Now Problem, and the Reality Problem involves three steps: 1. Finding a suitable phenomenological description of what it’s like to have all these experiences. 2. Analyzing their contents in more detail (the representational level). 3. Describing the functions bringing about these contents. Discovering the global NCC means discovering how these functions are implemented in the nervous system. This would also allow us to decide which other beings on this planet enjoy the appearance of a world; these beings will have a recognizable physical counterpart in their brains. On the most simple and fundamental level, the global NCC will be a dynamic brain state exhibiting large-scale coherence. It will be fully integrated with whatever generates the virtual window of presence, because in a sense it is this window. Finally, it will have to make earlier processing stages unavailable to high-level attention. Objective Value - Master Transparency of Conscious Value Transparency is both the answer and the empirical reason, for just about every question for why real experience happens. Transparency is the reason why water is wet, it is the reason pain exists, and is the explicans for the hard problem of consciousness. T'ransparency' is a property of epistemic states defined as follows: # An epistemic state E is weakly transparent to a subject S if and only if when S is in state E, S can know that S is in state E. # An epistemic state E is strongly transparent to a subject S if and only if when S is in state E, S can know that S is in state E, AND when S is not in state E, S can know S is not in state E. Pain is usually considered to be strongly transparent: when someone is in pain, he knows immediately that he is in pain, and if he is not in pain, he will know he is not. Transparency is important in the study of self-knowledge and meta-knowledge. Source. For starters, transparency is a property of active mental representations that are already satisfying the minimally sufficient constraints for conscious experience to occur. Some of these constraints might even be necessary conditions. For instance, phenomenally-transparent representations are always activated within a virtual window of presence and are functionally integrated into a unified global model of the world. Transparency results from a structural/architectonic property of the neural information-processing going on in our brains. The second thing which makes mental representations transparent is when they are not attentionally available to earlier processing stages in the brain for introspection. Attentional availability is a form of non-conceptual meta-representation operating on certain parts of the currently active, internal model of reality, the conscious model of the world. By guiding our attention towards a perceived object, we achieve a selection and an enhancement. By turning towards the phenomenal representation of this object, we automatically intensify the information processing in the brain, which underlies it. Simultaneously we increase our degree of alertness and orient towards the object in question. Within the representational architecture of the human mind, the guiding of attention is a supramodal capacity. For instance, attention can be shifted around independently of eye-movements, i.e. it can move within the visual field while the position of the eyes remain stable. Another beautiful and classical metaphor is that of describing visuo-spatial attention as a “cone of light.” This metaphor is consistent with a functional analysis of attentional meta-representation, because objects in the cone of light of attention are processed in a better, faster, deeper fashion. Another definition of Transparency is, for every phenomenal state, the degree of phenomenal transparency is inversely proportional to the introspective degree of attentional availability of earlier processing stages. This definition diverges from earlier notions of phenomenal transparency in allowing us to describe three important facts about phenomenal consciousness, which philosophers have frequently overlooked. # Firstly, cognitive availability of the fact that currently active phenomenal contents are the final products of internal representational processes is not enough to dissolve or weaken phenomenal transparency. The naïve realism of our experience remains. One cannot “think oneself out of” transparency (one’s phenomenal model of reality) with the help of purely cognitive operations alone. To simply have a mentally represented concept of the book you are holding in your hand, perhaps as being only a special form of representational contents, does not change the untranscendably realistic character of your phenomenal experience at all – at least not in a way that would be relevant in the current context. However, there seems to be a relevant difference between cognitive and attentional processing between conceptual and non-conceptual meta-representation of first-order phenomenal states. Only if you could actually attend to the construction process “itself” would you experience a shift in subjective experience, namely by adding new and non-conceptual content to your current model of reality. # Secondly, this definition departs from the classical vehicle-content distinction. The standard way of defining transparency would be to say that only content properties of the phenomenal representata are introspectively available to the system, and not vehicle properties. The vehicle-content distinction is a highly useful conceptual instrument, but it contains subtle residues of Cartesian dualism in that it always tempts us to reify the vehicle and the content by conceiving of them as ontologically distinct, independent entities. A more empirically plausible model of representational content will have to describe it as an aspect of an ongoing process and not as some kind of abstract object. What we need is embodied content, as it were – or rather, not “a” content, but an ongoing and physically realized process of containing. '' # Finally, describing phenomenal transparency in terms of the attentional availability of earlier processing 'stages' has the advantage of being able to develop many different, fine-grained notions of 'degrees' of transparency and opacity. For different phenomenal state-classes resulting from different types of processing, it may also be possible to describe not only variable degrees, but distinct 'kinds' of transparency and opacity. This allows for a much more realistic description of certain phenomenological features pertaining to different classes of conscious states. Transparency is a special form of darkness. With regard to the phenomenology of visual experience transparency means that we are not able to see something, ''because it is transparent. We don’t see the window, but only the bird flying by. The negative fact that we don’t see the medium, the window, is itself not explicitly represented in the seeing process itself. Phenomenal transparency in general, however, means that something particular is not accessible for subjective experience, namely the representational character of the contents of conscious experience. This analysis refers to all sensory modalities and to our integrated phenomenal model of the world as a whole in particular – but also to large parts of our self-model. The instruments of representation themselves cannot be represented as such, and hence the system making the experience, on this level and by conceptual necessity, is entangled in a naive realism. This happens, because, necessarily, it now has to experience itself as being in direct contact with the current contents of its own consciousness. What precisely is it, which the system cannot experience? What is inaccessible to conscious experience is the simple fact of this experience taking place in a medium. Therefore, transparency of phenomenal content leads to a further characteristic of conscious experience, namely the subjective impression of immediacy. Many bad philosophical arguments concerning direct acquaintance, infallible first-person knowledge and direct reference are based on an equivocation between epistemic and phenomenal immediacy: from the fact that the conscious experience, e.g., of the color of an object, carries the characteristics of phenomenal immediacy and direct givenness it does not follow that any kind of non-mediated or direct kind of knowledge is involved. Of course, there may be coincidences of phenomenal immediacy and epistemic immediacy. But phenomenal content – as such – is not epistemic content, and it is a widely held and plausible assumption that it locally supervenes on brain properties. For every veridical perception there will be a hallucinatory state, indistinguishable from the first-person perspective. What is common between the two is their phenomenal content (I like to call it the “lowest common denominator,” or, more traditionally, “the highest common factor”; see Metzinger 2004). Phenomenal content can be dissociated from intentional content: a brain in a vat could possess states subjectively representing object colors as immediately and directly given. Any fully transparent phenomenal representation is characterized by the vehicle-generating mechanisms, which have led to its activation, plus the fact of a concrete internal state now being in existence and carrying its content, not being introspectively available anymore. The phenomenology of transparency, therefore, is the phenomenology of naive realism. And of course, opaque phenomenal representations do exist as well. Here are some preliminary examples of opaque state-classes: Most notably consciously experienced thoughts, but also some types of emotions, pseudo-hallucinations or lucid dreams are subjectively experienced as representational processes. Such processes sometimes appear to us as deliberately initiated cognitive or representational processes, and sometimes as spontaneously occurring, limited or even global phenomenal simulations, frequently not under the experiential subject’s control. Lucidity, becoming aware that one is dreaming in a dream, is the standard example of a situation in which all of the conscious model of reality is suddenly experienced as a model. Source.